Privacy 2.0: The Garbo Economy

Privacy — like sex and money — is craved by many people. But in the Digital Age — with the insidious ease of online trackers, global positioning system devices and omnipresent security cams — privacy is becoming an increasingly rare commodity.

The more rare something is, the more valuable it is. The more valuable it is, the more savvy entrepreneurs want to traffic in it — buy and sell, swap and pawn. And so we are seeing the rise of a new economy — commerce that works overtime to give the rest of us some alone time. "We trade privacy for security," says Bob Garfield, advertising critic and author of The Chaos Scenario: Amid the Ruins of Mass Media, the Choice for Business is Stark: Listen or Perish. "We trade it for cents off at the supermarket cashier, so that Safeway knows exactly what ointments you use and in what quantity. Online, with varying degrees of awareness, we trade it for utility." Every step we take, every move we make, somebody's watching us. "Google searches, Foursquare check-ins and even basic browsing leave a practically neon trail," Garfield says. "And on Facebook, we trade privacy for a sense of community; we fear Big Brother, but we tell lots of 'little brothers' everything." For the first time in human history, Garfield says, privacy is extremely scarce "and therefore should be increasingly valuable. I'd call it the Garbo Economy, for people who just want to be left alone."